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What will enter the public domain in 2022

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Re: What will enter the public domain in 2022

#161

Post by chrismorgan »

jedberg wrote: post #129
chrismorgan wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say go simple on the copyright extension formula. If you treat it as a tax (scaling by revenue or similar), it gets messy, encourages dishonesty, and pretty much forces a new subindustry to spring up. But if you keep it simple, you can achieve much the same result without needing more staff in the tax or copyright offices, or inspiring the existence of copyright lawyers or accountants. Ten years of free protection,…

I like your general concept, but my concern with any fixed fee is that it pushes out small publishers in favor of big ones. A small publisher who is making say $300,000 from their work after 40 years can't afford to register it, but Disney can easily afford the 50 year fee. Also, the reason for registration right away is because otherwise you can't be sure a work is in the public domain or who to license it from for…

I don’t see how it would favour people with money, as it should become simple economics: Disney can afford the $1,300,000 at year 40, but if they project that their revenue from the work will be $300,000 in that year, why would they renew the copyright? They would instead allow it to lapse, and probably get somewhat reduced revenue. Cash flow should be the only situation where people with money could be favoured, and copyright renewal loans would become a thing to smooth that out (though I wouldn’t expect them to ever be common).

Registration is a heavy burden that has caused all sorts of pain in the past, and although terms are unreasonable these days I do think that automatic copyright is reasonable. You’re not unsure for ten years, you know for ten years from publication that it’s copyrighted—so you contact whoever wrote it, if you can find them, or you wait and see if not (which would be the case if it was registered anyway, since you can’t predict whether they’re going to renew the thing).

Actually, another argument against requiring registration: it strongly favours big publishers, who know the rules and are used to filling in the paperwork, and makes life harder for individuals, especially in the case of unexpected success (“I didn’t bother registering it because it’s been a waste of time every other time and I didn’t expect it to get popular”). After ten years, you’ll have a fairer idea whether your work is of meaningful commercial value, for which the answer is normally “no”.

Re: What will enter the public domain in 2022

#162

Post by toast0 »

bruce511 wrote: post #150
Kalium wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some would contend that preventing perpetual private censorship improves the lives of the public. Personally, I would be very impressed with any code still useful for incorporation into current things after 20 years. Certainly worth unshackling the original work from copyright.

Prepare to be impressed! All the following are still actively using code that I'd more than 20 years old; Gnu user tools, as used in Gnu Linux. Linux kernel. Pretty much all databases. (sqlite for example is 21 years old). Much of Windows, and Ms office. Not to mention mountains of my own code, still in production. 20 years is nothing in coding terms. Most developrs I know are small or single, and have one or two pro…

Linux 2.4 was pretty good, but even most of my IoT junk runs 2.6 which isn't quite 20 years old.

MySQL 4.0 was a lot better than 3.23 IIRC, and isn't quite 20 years old either.

IMHO, it's not so bad for the old version to become unrestricted; more recent changes can still be restricted. And 20 years of updates are often compelling enough to submit to restrictions.

What number seems right to you though? 95 years for work for hire or death of author + 70 (which is gonna be fun to track down for open source works with many author) seems rather long to me.

Re: What will enter the public domain in 2022

#163

Post by Starlevel001 »

jedberg wrote: post #82

This comes up every year so I ask a question: If you could fix copyright, how would you do it? Here is what I would do: 1. All works must be registered in a government registry. If it's not in there it's not copyrighted. If you want to register a work from before the law passes, you have to prove you own it under the current system. This would solve the orphan works problem -- if no one can prove they own it, it beco…

5 years flat, no extensions.

Why should the government prop up your failure to market something?

Re: What will enter the public domain in 2022

#164

Post by stephen_g »

moffkalast wrote: post #42
xwdv wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 100 year expiration is necessary for encouraging people to make new things rather than just shitty fan works until the end of our lifetimes.

Are they expecting to live 100 years from the point of writing? Till death of the author seems most sensible.

Having anything to do with the death of the creator is madness I think - makes it hard to keep track of it, and is quite arbitrary. It also doesn't make sense for anything released by a company (films etc.) so you have all these pointlessly different spans.

I think the very maximum reasonable copyright term is 50 years from the date of first publication/release. Simple.

Re: What will enter the public domain in 2022

#165

Post by phicoh »

LiquidPolymer wrote: post #147
jedberg wrote: post #82

This comes up every year so I ask a question: If you could fix copyright, how would you do it? Here is what I would do: 1. All works must be registered in a government registry. If it's not in there it's not copyrighted. If you want to register a work from before the law passes, you have to prove you own it under the current system. This would solve the orphan works problem -- if no one can prove they own it, it beco…

As someone who makes decent income via royalties from my copyrighted work, I object to this proposal. Purely from a record keeping perspective, the additional work required for my small business would add a considerable burden. And my accountant would probably have to do the math - thus costing me even more in fees. Large corporations like Disney and MCI are not the only entities who use copyright to protect property…

Copyright is something that is granted by the general public because as a whole everybody benefits from new works. This has been subverted in Europe, in that artists are entitled to have control over their works in ways other people don't. For example, an engineer has no control over an object after it has been sold. Nor do the heirs of an engineer get royalties if an object becomes rare an later gets sold for a lot of money.

Currently, too many works are effectively lost because it is unclear who has the copyright, or the rights are spread over too many people that effective negotiation of a new contract is impossible. There are also plenty of works that people consider part of their culture, where the rights are held privately. Famous cases in Europe are the Atomium in Belgium (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomium) or the Little Mermade in Denmark (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Mermaid_(statue))

The most simple way to fix the current system to limit copyright terms to 20 years.

There is no need for a copyright system where the heirs of a artist makes more money than the artist themselves.

And as a business, if to can't make a good return on an investment within 20 years, then it is time to do something else.

Re: What will enter the public domain in 2022

#166

Post by dmitriid »

bruce511 wrote: post #143
dwohnitmok wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> public good happens when copyrights expire seems less clear to me People can build upon the original work to make it better or use parts of it in their own work, instead of making things from scratch (things like music remixes, free translation, restoration of obsolete software etc.)

I hear this argument, but eh. You want to write a song, go write on, you don't need to mix someone else's. And if you do, go pay them something instead of just freeloading. Translations from one language to another I get, but again, if you want to make money translating books, go talk to the author and give them a share. Or write your own book in chosen language. Unless you have the source code to obsolete abandoned…

> You want to write a song, go write on, you don't need to mix someone else's.

Why I don't generally like bringing up fiction as proof of my words, Melancholy Elephants story has a very clear and explicit answer why this is a bad idea: http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html

On top of the examples already in the story: Disney's empire is built directly on the back of directly using public domain works or remixing existing works. And yet, you want to prevent anyone from doing just that.

Re: What will enter the public domain in 2022

#167

Post by fastball »

chrismorgan wrote: post #161
jedberg wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like your general concept, but my concern with any fixed fee is that it pushes out small publishers in favor of big ones. A small publisher who is making say $300,000 from their work after 40 years can't afford to register it, but Disney can easily afford the 50 year fee. Also, the reason for registration right away is because otherwise you can't be sure a work is in the public domain or who to license it from for…

I don’t see how it would favour people with money, as it should become simple economics: Disney can afford the $1,300,000 at year 40, but if they project that their revenue from the work will be $300,000 in that year, why would they renew the copyright? They would instead allow it to lapse, and probably get somewhat reduced revenue. Cash flow should be the only situation where people with money could be favoured, and…

I think jedberg's point is that revenue generated is not being factored in.

So Disney, who effectively has a monopoly on certain popular content can copyright it for a long time because they're making so much money off of it, while a small time copyright owner who is making $10k a year will not be able to make money for very long.

Re: What will enter the public domain in 2022

#168

Post by d110af5ccf »

vlunkr wrote: post #69
camjohnson26 wrote: post #24

Copyright law has damaged global culture. Who benefits when the copyright to Winnie-the-Pooh takes almost 100 years to expire? Only the companies who sell licensed merchandise. Think about how many fan works we’ll never see because we bizarrely decided to grant creators a monopoly on whatever they create, even if the work enters the public mythology like with Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. The people of the country…

It's especially bad for video games, but I don't see people discuss that so much. Think about this, probably 99% of games that are over 10 years old cannot be played legally on any modern hardware (console games at least, PC games are probably a bit better, but still might require some tinkering), that's a pretty serious loss of cultural history. I think copyright needs to be shortened if publishers don't make games…

> PC games are probably a bit better

Understatement. 20 year old PC game? Those commonly run with a compatibility layer like Wine. Old titles for DOS, Amiga, whatever? Full blown emulation because the performance requirements are absolutely trivial relative to modern hardware.

Lots of older consoles have impressive emulation efforts but it's definitely hit and miss. Such projects regularly pop up on HN.

Copyright seems broken though, I agree.

Re: What will enter the public domain in 2022

#169

Post by d110af5ccf »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #75
vlunkr wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's especially bad for video games, but I don't see people discuss that so much. Think about this, probably 99% of games that are over 10 years old cannot be played legally on any modern hardware (console games at least, PC games are probably a bit better, but still might require some tinkering), that's a pretty serious loss of cultural history. I think copyright needs to be shortened if publishers don't make games…

Yeah for software it's ridiculous. Copyright should just expire for that at 10 years. Not IP though so they will still own the characters and stories to make remakes and sequels. But the games themselves in the original version should become public domain. All the money that can be made on the sale of the original versions will have been made. It's especially becoming a problem now that games need online activation o…

Do you mean just a specific version of the binary? Because many games have been re-released and a few MMOs have been going for far longer than 10 years at this point.

> this won't be a technical possibility anymore once streaming exclusives appear

Just don't play them. I'm completely serious, why would I want to pay to support that model?

Re: What will enter the public domain in 2022

#170

Post by d110af5ccf »

cma wrote: post #80
spaetzleesser wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is no different from somebody who has a regular job or starts a business and passes away too soon. There is no security for the family either. In the end the main beneficiaries are big corporations and not creators.

Why should a 70 year old's same work product be worth much less than a 20 year old's? It should just be a period of time, with possibly exponentially increasing renewal fees so funds go into the common good the more the public domain is deprived.

This actually makes a lot of sense. If Disney was volunteering to pay hundreds of millions per year in additional taxes voluntarily ...
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